I can navigate in Maya...Need UV & SKIN Tutorials

NoSeRider

I took a Semester of Maya, so like always a class will to teach you things, but not what you need to know.

So I know how to navigate in Maya, but now I need practical information.

Got any Maya UV mapping tutorials? That you typically see that are similiar to Max?

Got any Maya Skinning tutorials that show you how to apply the vertexes to the bones?

I did my bouncing ball and jack in the box and flying spaceships....time to move on.

Snowfly

Ecch, sounds like a lousy class.

Here's how I set things up for UV work:
Open UV window, model in a maximized viewport, 'Edit Polygons > Texture' and 'UV Window > Polygons' menus torn off.
Select logical groups of faces in the viewport, and apply whatever mapping method seems appropriate. I end up with a lot of shells, so I use 'Move and Sew' to tidy things up. Select the edges you want to stitch together (in the UV window or viewport) and hit the 'Move and Sew' command. Then it's UV tweaking as usual. Lots of subtle 'straighten edge' and 'relax' usage.

And skinning for the Unreal engine...
Select the mesh and all the bones you want to bind it to. I'll open the Outliner if I want to leave a couple of bones out (makes it easier to deselect). And then hit 'Skin > Bind Skin > Smooth Bind'. If you open the options box, you can set how many bones to assign per vert. I like starting with 1 and then smoothing the weighting for the joints.
To tweak the weights, you can use 'Skin > Edit Smooth Skin > Paint Skin Weights Tool' with the tool settings window open, or open 'Window > General Editors > Component Editor'. select groups of verts on your model, and type in their weight values in the weight table under the 'Smooth Skins' tab.
Make sure to bend your skeleton to extreme positions so you can stress test your skin weighting. If they hold up well in extreme poses, they'll pretty much work for everything else.

Gmanx

http://www.thecontent-factory.com/3dTutorials_UVmaps_maya.html

A while ago since I wrote it, but you get the idea.

moose

a couple things i have found to help speed the process up with key bindings created in the hotkey editor (you will need to create a new command for most of them):

a Rotate left and right
polyRotateUVs 45;
polyRotateUVs -45;

flip selected uv's vertically
polyFlipUV -flipType 1 -local on;

flip selected UV's horizontally
polyFlipUV -flipType 0 -local on;

align uvs up
alignUV 0 0 1 0;

align uvs to the bottom
alignUV 0 0 1 1;

align uvs to the right
alignUV 1 0 0 0;

line up uvs to the left
alignUV 1 1 0 0;

other binds:

select shell (control right click, shell)
move and sew

using ctrl r click in the uvwindow will help out a lot too.

my basic workflow:

select chunk i want to unwrap
automatic map
move and sew chunks

you'll have to do more work getting all of the pieces at a proper res to one another, but it has proven to be a pretty quick way of mapping ive found.

SouL

Wow. Am I one of the few people that still planar map everything?
But then again... my mapping is weird.

moose

yeah i guess my basic workflow is only 90% right, somethings its easier to just planar or cylindrical.

just depends on the piece.

still move and sew like a mutha though